


don't think twice, it's alright

by orphan_account



Category: Bon Appétit Test Kitchen (Web Series)
Genre: #bwdfcftbatk (brad would die for claire from the bon appetit test kitchen), Dad Brad's Tips For Fixing Your Washer, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining, RPF, Second Kiss, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22913221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Claire figures it all out on a day where they aren’t filming, on a day when they’re both just in the kitchen working on their own things, chatting across stations, smiling over pots and pans.She loves him.
Relationships: Brad Leone/Claire Saffitz
Comments: 11
Kudos: 139





	don't think twice, it's alright

**Author's Note:**

> it's rpf, kiddos. let's keep it between us.

She’s standing at her station, her chin in her hands. 

“That’s a big cake,” says Brad. 

Claire doesn’t turn around. She can feel him hovering over her shoulder, all of his energy spread out along long limbs, the height and the breadth of him. 

“It wasn’t supposed to be,” says Claire. 

She doesn’t turn around, because she knows she doesn’t need to. Brad leans down next to her, forearms braced on the edge of the counter so he’s nearly at her eye-level, and Claire sighs and lets herself have this moment of complaining to him. 

“Well what happened, Claire?” Brad asks. He nudges a cake pan out of the way. Makes himself comfortable. “Did ya just not notice?”

She shoots him a look. He grins widely at her. She hits him on the arm anyway, more a brush of her palm against the rolled up sleeve of his flannel than anything. 

“I made, like,” she shakes her head, chin still resting in one palm, and indulges in another sigh. “Three times the amount of batter I was supposed to make.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t read.”

Brad laughs loudly, his face near and his hands folded there beside her, and Claire is annoyed by the way that sound always makes her smile. She wants to  _ wallow,  _ goddamn it. “That don’t add up from where I’m standing, Harvard,” he says, pointing a smirk her way. 

She lets her own smile unfold. Takes a seat on the stool she’d tugged up to the counter earlier, and crosses her ankles, turning to face him more fully. “The cake was supposed to be half this size,” she says, ticking points of on her fingers one by one, “so I’ll have to stay late tonight and make another one, because they’re supposed to come take pictures of it for the newsletter tomorrow and it has to, you know,  _ exist. _ ”

“It does, at that,” Brad says. 

Claire just sighs at him again. She’s going to get up eventually—soon, honestly—but she’s allowing herself just a few more moments of despair. 

“Boy oh boy, Claire,” says Brad. 

He straightens, and she thinks he’s just going to walk away, because it’s nearly six o’clock and she knows he’s off for the day—but instead he starts gathering discarded ingredients. Pulling out a couple of clean cake pans. Scooting her notes closer toward him, and peering down at the recipe. 

“Um,” says Claire, feeling a little slow. “Brad.”

He smiles calmly at her. “What’s up, Safftiz?”

Sometimes she laughs when she’s with him simply because she doesn’t know what else to do. She makes a limp sort of gesture at him, and the pans, and the recipe. 

“I’m helpin’ you out, Claire!” he says, giving her the sort of look he does when she tells him that she’s never used a band saw, or she doesn’t know how to retile her bathroom floors. Like it’s blindingly obvious, and he can’t believe she doesn’t see it. 

“Oh,” she said, unaccountably flustered. “Brad. You don’t have to…”

Another look. She can’t read this one. 

“I know I don’t, Claire,” he says. 

She doesn’t stop him. She sits on her stool with her arms folded neatly, and she lets him help her with this next round of baking, even though the sun is no longer in the sky, even though he got off work hours ago by the time they’re done. 

  
  
  


Claire doesn’t know about this YouTube thing. 

She tells Brad, walking side-by-side as they leave Rapo’s office. “I don’t know about all this.”

They’d just been shown the screen tests that they’d recorded a couple weeks ago. Claire’s never imagined herself in a situation where she’d have to watch her own face on a laptop in front of her boss and her boss’s boss, but if she had, she would’ve guessed it’d go about how it did. Which is embarrassingly. 

She isn’t a natural on camera. She’s stiff and too clinical and unapproachable, her movements practiced, her words rote. She was miserable while they recorded her, and it came across on the video, even though the editors had done their best. 

Brad looks down at her now, head tipped. He moves with long strides, loping steps, but he’s slowed himself a little to keep pace with her as they wind their way through darkened cubicles, and Claire appreciates that. “Whaddya mean?”

Their coats are hung on the rack by the office door. Brad gets Claire’s down and hands it to her, then shrugs his own on. 

Brad had been wonderful in his video. He’s the most likeable person Claire has ever met—all easy smiles and fast, deep familiarity that makes everybody feel at ease with him immediately, even someone who never feels at ease with anyone, even Claire—and she knows that anybody who gets to watch him fumble his good-natured way through making kombucha is going to fall in love hard and fast. She would watch him, even though she spends most days in the test kitchen doing just that. 

Brad’s a natural on camera. He’s gonna take off. 

“I don’t know,” she says, even though she does. She’s whining, and she hates it: she can hear it in her voice, she can feel it in the angle of the way she looks up at him. Shoulders slumped, eyes wide. He’s receptive to it though. He watches her with Brad-like fondness. “I’m just… I’m not a camera person. I’m not a person person.”

“Sure you are, Claire,” he says, shouldering the door open and holding it for her as she passes through. “You looked great up there. Knew what you were doing, didn’t fuckin’ spill kombucha everywhere—hell, you taught me a few things, Claire.”

She smiles at him, and lets her shoulder bump his as they pile into the elevator, silent thanks. “I just felt. I don’t know.”

Brad just looks at her, and doesn’t interrupt. Letting her gather her thoughts. 

“I don’t think people are going to like me very much,” she says finally. She sounds too quiet. Too small. Her voice barely presses through the silence around them. “I’m just. Me.”

Introverted and quiet and a little shy. A know-it-all. Entirely too invested in everything. The least spontaneous person on the planet. Not very friendly. 

Brad looks legitimately confused, and Claire feels her face go hot, because of course Brad doesn’t understand the concept of disliking someone. He always just sees the good in everything. 

That’s another quality she doesn’t have. Her pessimism is legendary. 

“Claire,” he says. Brad isn’t a serious guy, but he looks it now. He isn’t teasing her, not even in the gentle, friendly way she’s grown used to. “Everybody here loves you. You’re the  _ best. _ ”

“Oh, Brad,” she says, a little helplessly, more than a little awkward. It looks like she was fishing for compliments now, and she really wasn’t, and the surface level of her face has never been warmer. “Thank you.”

“I mean it, Saffitz,” he says. He touches her arm, fingers brushing right above her elbow, right above the hem of her sleeve. “You’ve won over the whole test kitchen. We’re picky sons-of-bitches, ya know that, Claire, so even if the Internet  _ doesn’t  _ like you—which it will—that don’t matter.” He lets that smile loose now, warm and reassuring, and he isn’t touching her anymore but they’re still standing close like they always do, and that’s almost as grounding. “Plus if any of ‘em give you any trouble—” he mock-scowls, punches one fist into the flat of his opposite palm— “they gotta deal with me.”

It makes her laugh, which had obviously been his goal. And honestly, she  _ does  _ feel better. She knows the rest of the test kitchen likes her—is fairly sure, anyway—but there’s something affirming about hearing Brad say it. Something reassuring. 

She wonders if that’ll hold up under the inevitability of a bad response, of hate-comments and little-to-no views. She hopes it will. She thinks it just might. 

“We’re in this together, Claire,” he tells her, quiet, standing on the corner where they part to go back to their respective homes. His hands are in his pockets and they face each other, Claire’s face tipped up, Brad’s tipped down. She watches him smile at her, with more than just his mouth. “We look out for each other, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she murmurs. She means it as much as he does. They’re a team, the two of them. 

“Night, Saffitz,” Brad says, and touches her again, a brush to her shoulder, before he walks away. 

Claire watches him bob through the crowd, heads above everyone else.

He’s a good friend. She hopes he knows that. 

  
  
  


Claire stays late. Claire always stays late. It’s just what she does. 

She doesn’t mean to, necessarily—it’s just that she’s always getting caught up in perfecting something, in doing something over and over and over again until not only can nobody else find any flaws with it but neither can she, and clocking out doesn’t even cross her mind.

She’s like that tonight. Making and making and re-making a tray of shortbread, balancing butter content and flour type and sugar levels, searching for the kind of perfection that is  _ just there _ — 

“Oh, Claire! You still here?”

She jumps a little, hand going to her chest, glad that she’d put that last tray down before he’d called her name. 

Claire whirls around.  _ “Brad. _ ”

He’s standing by the walk in, hands out like he can stop her from being scared if he reaches far enough, cringing back like he knows she’s getting ready to yell, and Claire’s tired and her heart’s still beating fast and he’s cowering there, all 6’4” of him, and she sits down hard on her stool and starts to laugh. 

“Sorry!” Brad says. There’s always an exclamation point somewhere in every couple of sentences with him; she finds herself looking for them. He ramps up her enthusiasm no matter what he says. “Thought you heard me noodlin’ around back here.”

Brad crosses the length of the kitchen between them in a few steps. He’s draped over her station—smiling, the top curves of his ears pink—in no time at all. 

“No,” she says, still laughing, the kind of helpless laughter that she only ever sinks into when she’s truly tired, “no, you know how I get.”

“Yeah,” he says. It’s true. He does. Brad—purely by chance since he’s the only one constantly hovering around her—has a better sense of these focused (obsessive) moods she slips into than anyone else in the kitchen. “How’s it going back here? No disasters? No tragedies?”

“No disasters,” confirms Claire, and she isn’t lying. Things are going fine. She just wants them to go  _ perfectly. _ “No tragedies.”

“Great,” says Brad, winking at her as he straightens up. She gets the sense that he knows exactly what’s running through her head, and it makes her blush, but she ignores that. “Are you comin’ out with the rest of us, Claire? You could use a break, that’s what I say.”

_ Shit, _ she thinks. She’s realizing all of a sudden just what a mess she’s made throughout the day, and how long that’s going to take her to clean up, and how late it’ll be before she can join the rest of the chefs at the bar on the corner they all favor for their weekly night out. 

“Shit,” says Claire out loud. 

Brad laughs at her. It’s a little mean, but it’s Brad, so she doesn’t mind. 

“You know, Brad,” she says, turning fully toward him, aiming for coy and missing it by about a mile, “you could… help me.”

“Oh, yeah, could I, Claire?” But he’s grinning as he says it. He’s clearing away cluttered pans and looking at her with a full force of warmth behind his eyes, and Brad looks at everyone like that because Brad’s the  _ best, _ but it still makes the hollow nestled behind Claire’s ribs burn hot.

  
  
  


Everyone’s gathered in their corner booth by the time Brad and Claire show up, already a couple drinks in, voices loud and smiles wide. 

Brad slides into his usual spot on the end, and Claire scoots herself down the bench beside him, even though the square of upholstery is small and there isn’t much leg room, coming up close against the big, soft warmth of him. She’d rather wedge herself in here than climb over Andy on the other end, and anyway she always sits here. No need to break tradition. 

She’s caught up justifying this to herself for a couple moments, thoughts winging furiously through her brain before she realizes that it’s stupid and she doesn’t _ have to  _ justify anything to anyone, not even herself, and by the time she’s done the conversation has picked up around her and she feels unaccountably warm all of a sudden. 

Brad gives her a look out of the corner of his eye—fleeting, but no less intent. He’s checking up on her. 

She smiles back at him widely. Fine. See?

“How’d you pull Claire out of crazy-intense pastry land, Brad?” Molly asks across the table, sending Claire a grin. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Oh, you know, Mols, I just made a racket until she looked up,” he says. He has his left arm stretched along the top of the booth, right along the line of Claire’s shoulders. Claire doesn’t think he notices. Claire notices. “And then she forced me to clean up for her. Payback, baby.”

“You could’ve said no, Brad,” says Claire, automatic, because that’s how they are. Bickering even when they’re both perfectly content with the way things go between them. It’s an autopilot sort of feeling, having conversations like this with Brad: easy and unthinking. 

Brad looks at her again, fully this time. He looks… disbelieving. “Claire,” he says, a little bit of a laugh. “Nobody could say no to you, Claire.”

She blinks at him. “...what?”

“It’s the eyes,” Delaney points out. He clearly thinks he’s being helpful. Claire writes him off as drunk and unreasonable. “You do this, like, thing with your eyes, I don’t know.”

Everyone is laughing now. All of them, even Carla, who Claire can  _ usually  _ count on as being on her side. Claire feels herself grinning even though they’re all so obviously ridiculous. “I do not do a  _ thing  _ with my eyes!” she protests, looking around at all of them. “I don’t!”

“Hate to break it to you, Claire,” says Brad, who does not sound or look like he hates to break it to her, “but you totally do. There’s a voice thing, too—”

“The  _ voice thing _ ,” Andy says emphatically. 

“Braaad,” says Molly, pitching her tone high, leaning over the table again and blinking her eyes up at Brad, who is laughing a bit less than the rest of them. “My name is Claire and I’m adorable so I know you’re going to drill through this thing for me.”

“I hate all of you,” Claire says, sinking down into her seat and sipping at her beer to hide her face. Her face, which has not stopped flaming all evening. She can’t decide if she’s annoyed or amused, but she’s certainly embarrassed. “I do  _ not  _ sound like that.”

“Not when you’re talking to anyone else,” Delaney mutters into his drink. Molly cackles wildly. 

Claire abruptly stops being amused. Not even a little bit amused. 

There’s something heavy and sick-feeling in the pit of her stomach. 

She doesn’t sound like that. Does she? Doesn’t look like that at… at him. Brad. 

The rest of them have moved onto some other topic, clearly bored with teasing the fuck out of Claire, but Brad is looking at her again, and his gaze is steady and knowing. 

She doesn’t look back at him. 

“Don’t worry Claire,” he says quietly. “You don’t do all that. And even if you did, I wouldn’t mind.”

She doesn’t answer. But throughout the course of the night his arm sinks down until it’s draped around her shoulders, and she doesn’t ask him to move. 

  
  
  


So Half-Sour has become… a thing. 

It’s been a solid year of the nickname, and Claire  _ should  _ be annoyed by it, she knows that she should be, but there’s something so fucking fond about the way it sounds when Brad says it on a smile that she can’t bring herself to make him quit. 

He’s said it enough times in videos now that even the Internet is calling her that—and they’re fond when they say it, too. 

Brad was right all those days and weeks and months and years ago. Claire is big enough to admit it. People definitely don’t hate her. 

She has no idea why. 

It isn’t like she’s positive, not by a long shot: there’s probably enough footage of her throwing some sort of temper tantrum during Gourmet Makes to fill up a short film, and even when she’s succeeding, her naturally pessimistic nature shines through. Her job is  _ hard,  _ and she’s honestly not that good at it, but for some reason the whole world likes watching her fail, so here she is. 

Claire has become a thing. 

People know her name. People know her face. She has more Instagram followers than she ever thought she’d have. Then she’s ever  _ wanted  _ to have. She’s built a fandom out of her failure. 

She doesn’t know how she feels about that. 

Brad pops into her videos with frequency, and Claire knows she likes that. He usually manages to drag her up out of whatever dark hole she’s baking her way into, with a sunny smile and a laughing nickname and a ridiculous but sometimes legitimately helpful idea, and Brad is the only thing, Claire thinks sometimes, that keeps her from completely breaking down on her worst days. 

“It’s not right,” Claire says flatly. 

Today is one of the worst days. 

“Eh, not quite,” Brad agrees. He pokes at the mess—it’s supposed to be Skittles, but it’s some sort of crystalized sugar substance instead, and Claire has tried and tried and tried— 

“Dan,” she says sharply, “don’t put this part in.” 

And then she sets down her bowl of Not Skittles with enough force to shatter the thinnest bits inside, and stalks off toward the walk-in. 

She hears Brad behind her—“I’ll just check, just real quick, hold on”—but she doesn’t slow her pace. She just keeps walking. Wrenches open the door and steps into freezing air and sits down hard on the stool Gaby keeps in here for inventory.

Claire closes her eyes and waits for him to follow her. 

He steps in much more quietly than she had. Doesn’t slam the door behind him. 

“I am  _ so sick, _ ” Claire whispers, and hates the wobble in the middle of her words, “of messing up.”

Brad is never this quiet on camera. Only when she needs him to be. “C’mere, Half-Sour,” he murmurs, and stretches out a hand to her, and she lets him pull her up off the stool and into his arms and she tucks herself in, she folds herself up in Brad, and she just breathes. 

“It ain’t ever as bad as you think it is,” Brad says. Still quiet. One big hand is fiddling with her apron strings because he can never keep still, not even for something like this, and that thought very nearly makes Claire smile. “Hell, Claire. You think anybody else could do what you do?”

Her breath is still shaking a little, so she doesn’t force herself to resurface just yet. Lets her face tuck into the crook of Brad’s neck. 

“It’s not just Gourmet Makes,” she says. “It’s… god, everything. My book, and the freelance stuff I’m doing, and I’m just not good enough—”

“Hey,” Brad says sharply. She pulls back to look up at him, surprised, worried for a second that he’s angry at her, but it’s clear that he isn’t. He just looks serious. Brad is so rarely serious; she pays attention. “Don’t you ever say that, Claire. You’re the best, remember? I told ya that a long time ago and I still mean it, bub. Nobody’s got nothin’ on you.”

She doesn’t think he’s right. She doesn’t agree with him. But he’s so fucking earnest, and nobody has ever had this much complete faith in her. This total belief that she can do absolutely anything. 

Claire would hate to disappoint him. 

“And look,” he adds, obviously trying to lighten things. “I’m always here for you, Half-Sour, yeah? Day or night, you just give me a call.”

He means it, is the thing. She knows he does. 

Something nameless inside her shifts. 

“Thanks, Brad,” she says quietly. 

Claire pulls through. Claire figures it out, and maybe she’ll laugh about it later, thinking about that whole mess, but she doesn’t think her success is going to be the part of this day that she remembers best. 

  
  
  


Claire figures it all out on a day where they aren’t filming, on a day when they’re both just in the kitchen working on their own things, chatting across stations, smiling over pots and pans. 

She loves him. 

She stumbles as the thought hits her, tripping over her feet and stretching a hand out haphazardly to catch her balance. She grabs onto the hot cookie sheet she left sitting on top of the stove—stupid, she’s so  _ stupid _ — and swears loudly as it burns her, tears leaping to her eyes. 

“Shit, Claire!”

He’s by her in a second with the first aid kit, taking her wrist gently in his huge hand, running cold water over the burn striking a clean swath across her palm. She’s crying a little, tears leaking down her cheeks, and she can’t tell if it’s the throbbing pain or the realization she’s just had that’s tearing her apart like this. 

“Hush, it’s ok, it’s ok,” he’s murmuring, wrapping her hand, moving so gently. Every time he touches her, she shakes. “I gotcha, Claire, babe, it’s ok.”

It isn’t ok. None of this is ok. She’s such an idiot—for thinking she’d ever be satisfied as only his friend, for realizing like this, for grabbing that  _ fucking  _ pan. 

“Sorry,” she gasps. She doesn’t know why she’s apologizing—she  _ does  _ know why she’s apologizing, but he doesn’t, and—and his skin is warm and a little rough against hers, and between one ragged breath and the next her palm is completely taken care of, safe and dry and only stinging a little. 

“There you go,” Brad says softly. He’s still holding her wrist, just cradling it gently, like he’s afraid she’ll break into a million pieces if he lets go. “Right as rain, yeah, Claire? All better? Tell me what you need, Claire.”

“I’m ok,” she says. She sounds small. She’s lying, lying, lying. “I made it look worse than it was.”

Brad’s gaze is steady on her face, unflinchingly present, too blue to look up into. She thinks he knows that she isn’t telling the truth, but it’s anybody’s guess as to whether or not he’ll call her out on it. 

He doesn’t. “Gotta be careful in here, Half-Sour,” he says at last, and there’s a teasing lilt to his words, but Brad’s doing that thing he does sometimes: wearing that careful blankness across his features, inscrutable, unable to be read. He’s more sensitive than anyone gives him credit for. He’s more intuitive than anyone knows. “Test kitchen’s a dangerous place. We can’t afford to go losin’ our talent now, huh?”

That gets him half a smile and a watery laugh, and he lets go of her slowly, fingertips lingering. 

  
  
  


He’s the last person she tells. 

She hates it, but she can’t make herself speak, can’t make herself say those words. He grins at her over the dehydrator and Claire can’t fathom saying  _ this is it, this is my last one, I’m leaving. I’m gone.  _

It feels like a resignation when she tells everyone else, like a natural part of moving on. It feels like quitting when she thinks of telling Brad. 

“Does he know?” Carla asks her. They’re standing side-by-side at two stoves in the back of the kitchen, and Brad has just walked by with a whistle on his breath and a fond smile for Claire. Claire is watching the broad line of his shoulders as he walks away. 

She shakes her head. Doesn’t look at Carla. 

Carla is quiet for long enough that Claire starts to hope she might not say anything—futilely though, because when she turns back around, Carla is leveling a gaze at her that is as rephrehending as any expression Claire’s mother has ever worn. 

“Do you really want him to find out that way?” Carla asks. Her voice is a mixture of firm and protective, and it hits Claire in some unguarded place that she wasn’t expecting: she’s going to  _ miss  _ these people. All of them. “Do you really want him to look up one day and realize you’re gone without a word?”

Claire wants too many things to pick and choose. 

“No,” she says quietly. “I just…”

Carla’s expression softens. 

“You’re his favorite Claire,” she says, and she says the word like she means a million other things.  _ Favorite.  _ It’s something, but it isn’t everything. “He’s gonna be happy for you if you’re happy. But you need to prepare him first.”

  
  
  


Claire waits until the end of the day when they’re both leaving to catch up to him. 

He smiles at her when she steps into the elevator next to him. The arc of his mouth goes straight through her: a hot knife through butter. 

She can’t believe she has to tell him. 

“Barely knew you were here today, Half-Sour,” Brad says, hands in his pockets, hair tufting out of the bottom of his hat. He’s smiling cheerfully, a friendly force, and that just makes all of this so much harder. “Ya made yourself scarce.”

Usually she’d banter with him, shoot something back, but she can’t make herself do that today. “Brad,” she says quietly. 

His expression changes instantly. 

There’s that careful blankness again. Except it’s close enough to hurt this time; it all catches Claire in the chest, makes her go breathless for half a second. 

“Just say it, Claire,” Brad murmurs. He hasn’t gotten close to her but the space feels smaller. She sways with the swing of the elevator; puts a hand out and steadies herself against the wall. “Get it over with, yeah?”

Her voice is shattered. Torn up. Wavering on the thread-thin line of air in her lungs. “You know.”

Not a question. 

She thinks of the way she can’t tell anything by looking at him. Brad Leone, loud and exuberant, close and so observant that Claire doubts she’s ever gotten a single fucking thing past him. 

“Say it,” Brad repeats. Marginally less control in his tone, and it’s maddening, but Claire can’t quite tell which emotional direction he’s leaning. Anger? Sadness? She’s shivering along the lines of her veins. “Please. So I can stop wonderin’ when you will.”

“I’m leaving,” Claire whispers. She doesn’t mean to whisper, but she can’t go any louder. “But I don’t want you to be mad at me. Please don’t be mad.”

He could, she thinks. He could be mad. Even though he never has been before. 

But—”Claire,” he murmurs, and the elevator grinds to a halt, and the doors slide open. She wants to know what he’s thinking. She hates that she can’t tell what he’s thinking. “I ain’t mad. Couldn’t get mad at you if I tried, Claire, you know that by now.”

For one last wild second Claire wants to reach out and wrap him around her, pull him in close along all the outlines of her skin. 

But he steps out of the elevator. 

Hands in his pockets, not meeting her eyes. “Keep in touch, yeah?” His voice goes gruff, and not like he means for it too. “Gonna miss you.”

There’s a second where she should answer, but she can’t push words up out of her throat. Brad nods at the ground, and his footsteps are loud when he walks away. 

  
  
  


She’s been working freelance out of her apartment for a couple of months when she gets a text from him. 

**1:24**

_ hey half sour!! heard about the menu  _

_ you put together uptown. that’s the stuff!!  _

There’s a row of incomprehensible emojis after the line of text, blinking up at Claire with jewel-toned intent. She stares at the screen of her phone. Stares and stares. 

She hasn’t heard from him while she’s been gone. The rest of them have contacted her off and on: she meets them for drinks sometimes, and she and Christina have a semi-weekly lunch date that’s wordlessly been decided upon—but she hasn’t heard a word from Brad. 

And here’s this. Out of the blue on a Tuesday afternoon. 

Claire spends too long trying to decide what to say, typing and re-typing until every sentence sounds awful and her shaking fingers slip and hit send on her most recent bad idea. 

**1:35**

_ Thanks Brad! I had a lot of fun.  _

That’s not true. She hasn’t been having  _ fun  _ since she left Bon Appetit, and that particular occasion had been even more stressful than most. Not the least because she didn’t have a team of real friends behind her to help her laugh at herself, or a legion of blindly adoring fans to be charmed even though she’s an idiot. 

It’s not about having fun. That’s what she tells herself. 

**1:36**

_ good to hear :) _

**_1:37_ **

_ whipped out the ole dehydrator for a  _

_ new hire yesterday and they didnt  _

_ laugh at my jokes which takes points _

_ off in my humble opinion  _

Claire doesn’t know what’s going on. Are they doing this? Are they talking again, laughing with each other, joking over kitchen appliances even though it’s been months? 

Talking about Claire’s replacement? 

She shouldn’t answer him. 

**1:39**

_Maybe you weren’t being funny._ _Maybe this person was just trying to_ _do their job, Brad ;)_

She adds the winking face to soften the blow, and by the time panic has set in she’s already sent it. 

It takes him a minute too long to answer.  _ Fuck, _ Claire thinks, and sits down hard at her kitchen table, chin landing in her hand.

The phone buzzes. She’s almost too scared to look. 

She looks. 

**1:43**

_ oh you keep me honest claire!  _

Sure. That’s what she’s doing. 

Claire thinks about Brad asking her to keep in touch. Claire thinks about how she hasn’t done that. Not at all. 

Here she is, falling back into those same patterns she’s been trying to escape from: hanging back from the things that hurt, letting Brad make all her emotional decisions for her. 

She can’t do that anymore. She can’t sit here and realize that none of this was worth it, that she isn’t ever going to change. That she left them for no reason at all. 

**1:45**

_ That’s my job.  _

  
  
  


He texts her a lot now. 

Which is notable—of course it is—but not as notable as the fact that Claire texts him back. 

Brad sends her a selfie of him and Vinny on location somewhere, the sun vivid-bright, Brad squinting up into the glare with a beam and Vinny with a characteristically bemused expression. Brad is… a force.

She grins wide when she gets the photo. She spends too long looking at it, and at the way his eyes are focused right on the camera despite the sun, and at the way it seems like he’s looking right back out at her. 

Brad tells Claire about the new stand mixers Gaby ordered for the kitchen, and about that time Andy almost cut a finger off while he was chopping onions and staring the barrel of the camera down, and the family of cats that Brad found living beneath his own front porch. 

Claire tells Brad about custom wedding cakes, and designing menus for a couple of upscale bakeries, and the idea that she’s had in the back of her mind for a while now, the idea of maybe opening up her own. Claire tells Brad about visiting her family in Cape Cod. Claire tries to tell Brad about the weird thing her washing machine is doing, but it’s too hard to explain over text, so before her courage runs out she gives up and calls him instead. 

“It’s, like…” she has speakerphone on, and is holding her cell up to the grumbling machine. Brad is laughing at her. “Possessed.”

“Your washing machine ain’t possessed, Claire,” Brad says, sounding amused and indulgent and fond at the same time, and Claire’s face is hot even though he isn’t here to see her. She finds herself grinning. Tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. “Your shock absorbers are weak, right? So you gotta—”

“C’mon Brad—my what are  _ what? _ ” she huffs as he laughs again, clicking the speaker off and leaning back against the blessedly still dryer as she holds the phone up to her ear. “You know me, you know you gotta speak in layperson’s terms,” she wheedles.

“Shock absorbers, Claire! That’s why it’s goin’ bounce-bounce and not, you know, wash-wash.”

She’s laughing hard enough that her stomach hurts a little bit. She can’t answer him. 

After a moment Claire realizes that Brad’s gone quiet on the other end of the line, his laughter dwindled down to mostly nothing. She bites her lip, presses back into the unforgiving metal of her dryer. 

They’re quiet. 

“I could—” he cuts himself off. He’s choosing his words carefully, something Brad rarely does, and Claire finds herself hanging on to every syllable. “I could come over and help you with that, Claire. I’m not too busy.”

Claire spends too long trying to think of something casual to say in response. One breath passes between them, and then two, and then three. 

His voice is loud the next time he speaks, like he’s trying to cover something up. “Or I could getcha hooked up with the right tools and you could get on the ol’ YouTubes...”

She can’t let him sound like that. The same blankness that’s on his face sometimes. 

Claire takes a deep breath, fingers curling tight over the hard plastic of her phone case. 

“When’re you free?” 

  
  
  


He shows up with his toolbox in one hand and a six pack in the other, baseball cap backwards, smile more tentative than Claire has ever seen it. 

Her face hurts with the width of her own. 

“Hi,” Claire says, holding tight to the doorframe. She thinks that if she lets go she might reach out and grab him. And she can’t do that. Obviously. 

But Brad is  _ Brad _ —effortless, enthusiastic, full of surprises—and he sets down his toolbox and his beer and sweeps Claire up into a hug before he’s even said a word. 

“Oh,” says Claire softly. She’s saying it into his neck—she’s hugging him back, arms twined around his waist, up in her toes to get as close to him as possible, and all of him hits her: his warmth, his scent, the reassuring breadth of him, strong and steady and finally tangible. 

Claire’s eyes prick hot. She slams them closed, and focuses on the rasp of his beard against her cheek. 

“Hey there, Half-Sour,” murmurs Brad. He says it like he’s smiling. Hands pressing warm against the small of her back, heart beating rapidfire against hers. “Long time no see, huh?”

She laughs, because that’s what she does with Brad. If it’s tighter than usual—if it’s shakier than usual—neither of them say anything. 

Claire slips back from him, and her hands glide down his arms as she pulls away. She blushes when she realizes what she’s done. He doesn't seem to notice. 

“Yeah,” she says, toying with the end of her braid, smiling, smiling. “It’s been a while.”

Brad has a gentle web of happy lines around his eyes as he looks down at her. His expression hits her in a tender spot right between her ribs. “You’re lookin’ good, Claire.”

She’s hot all over, flushed from her chest to her ears—but he is too. She takes some comfort in that. 

“You too,” she says, and laughs again, palm fitted over her mouth, and doesn’t know where to look as he bends to pick up his things. 

  
  
  


Claire sits on the dryer, beer in hand, legs swinging. 

Brad is on the floor. Brad’s head is in her washer. Claire’s washer is… sideways. 

She has no idea what the hell he’s doing, but she figures he probably does, and anyway, he can’t make it worse than it already is. 

Plus she likes him like this. Like this: here, with her, in her apartment. Chattering cheerfully at her feet, his familiar voice, the mellow clank of his tools against metal. 

Claire probably shouldn’t have had this last beer. Oh well. 

“Well, Claire,” says Brad loudly, scooting out from beneath the washer and sitting up on her tile floor, legs sprawled out, face tipped up to look at her, “I think we’re kickin’, babe! Nice nice!”

“Oh yeah?” she’s giggling. Maybe she should be embarrassed by that—distantly she is—but the way Brad is looking at her right now is making her forget things like that. It’s just been so long. “You sure?”

His eyebrows lift. “You questioning me?  _ Me _ ? Who’s the one who used to make all those fancy tools for you when you wanted ‘em, huh?”

They both go quiet at that. Claire can feel the laugh fizzle out of her chest, feel her smile drop fast. 

_ Used to make.  _

Brad is watching her closely. He gets to his own feet, grunting a little, and takes a couple steps nearer, and he’s just so very tall, she has to tip her head back to meet his eyes, and— 

“Listen, Claire,” he says quietly, and then he stops. Those eyes are too blue. She feels them like a weight on her skin, a vivid, electric press. 

She slides off of the dryer. 

“Fuck it,” he murmurs, and then he’s dipping forward with a hand at the soft curve of her waist, and he’s kissing her. 

It’s fast and light and—and his lips and his hands and his chest and his too-fast breath and— 

He steps away. 

Claire realizes that she hadn’t moved, not at all, not that whole time. She’s frozen now. 

“Brad,” whispers Claire. Her heart’s beating so fast that it actually hurts, something wild and throbbing at the base of her throat. She doesn’t know where to look at him. She’s dizzy: with his nearness, with the lingering rasp of his lips against hers, with the alcohol she’s had. 

She reaches out to steady herself against something, but there’s nothing but him, and her hands fall empty. 

**“** Sorry,” he says, pale, not looking at her. One hand scrubbing at the back of his neck. There is nothing on his face. No expression for her to read.  **“** Shit, Claire, fuck—I’m sorry.”

Claire hasn’t breathed since he touched her. The small of her back is pressed against cold dryer metal, her hands are empty, the burn across her palm sears even after all these months, and she can’t pull any air into her lungs. 

“I,” she says, grasping, grasping, “I can’t.”

Not looking at her. “I know,” he says. Fast after she’s done speaking, almost like he’d been planning on saying it. Brad is big, but right now there’s something disturbingly small about him, and Claire can’t  _ fucking breathe.  _ “You don’t hafta explain it to me, Claire. Here, I’ll just—” he bends, gets her washing machine sat back up. Cleans up his tools. 

She can still taste him. 

“Listen,” he says again. For a wild moment she thinks he might try to kiss her a second time—but of course he doesn’t. She’d said no. He looks at her though, finally, and she wishes he hadn’t. “Just forget all about this Half-Sour, yeah?” He smiles, tight and small. “I just had too much to drink, or, fuck, something. I’m sorry.”

He hadn’t even finished his first beer. She doesn’t point that out. 

He needs to stop apologizing. 

“It’s ok,” she says faintly. “It’s ok, Brad.”

She doesn’t walk him to the door. 

  
  
It’s on her to reach out. She knows that he won’t, knows that he thinks he overstepped and won’t contact her in case she doesn’t want him to. 

Claire can’t tell if she’s angry. She’s—she just— 

God. Why hadn’t he done it before? Why hadn’t he kissed her months and months ago,  _ years  _ ago, when she could have kissed him back? 

She left. And he didn’t ask her to stay. 

It’s not fair. 

Claire cries a little, just for a couple of minutes that evening, sitting on her couch with her legs crossed and her face in her hands so she won’t catch a glimpse of her reflection in the black TV screen across the room. Just a little, because her mouth still remembers the feel of his, and that’s going to have to be a memory that lasts her a very long time. 

  
  
  


**11:14**

_Washer hasn’t made a sound since_ _you left. Guess I shouldn’t question_ _you, should I?_

**11:15**

…

…

…

_ guess i know my stuff !  _

  
  
  


They still text, and it doesn’t take too long before they’ve worked back up to phone calls, and then FaceTime beyond that. It should be weird: it should be awful, talking to him after that, after  _ Brad, I can’t _ —but they’ve never done things the way that they should, and why would they start now?

So they chat back and forth, and if sometimes she calls him just because she misses the sound of his voice, if sometimes she FaceTimes him because watching his videos isn’t enough—well. Neither of them say it. And if neither of them say it, it doesn’t matter if they both know. 

Her phone rings one day as she’s stacking a precarious row of mille-feuilles, and Claire puts down her piping bag gratefully to answer. 

“Hey, Brad,” she says. She sounds far too happy to hear from him. She can’t tone it down. “What’s up?” 

It takes him a second too long to answer. “Vinny left,” he says finally. 

“Oh, Brad,” she says quietly. She straightens up from where she’d been leaning against the counter, presses the phone to her ear like she’s reaching out to him. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just the cycle of things I suppose, Half-Sour,” Brad says, but he’s too loud and too chipper and she can tell he’s hurt, under all those brash layers. She thinks of Carla’s words:  _ you’re his favorite.  _ Well if Claire was his favorite, then Vinny was God. “I’m happy for him, yanno, he’s a good guy, he’s off makin’ his way in the world, but, uh.” 

Brad stops. Usually when he’s searching for words it’s funny; today it sounds like he’s gone empty. 

“Vinny’s one of the best,” she says softly. 

“Yeah,” Brad says. Quiet. “I guess all the best ones move on.”

  
  
  


Claire sits in her empty kitchen, lights off, nothing but the sunset outside her window letting her see. 

She can’t remember why she’s doing this anymore. 

She’d been so tired at Bon Appetit. Mentally and physically exhausted—the long days, weekends that she barely saw, illness after illness, failure after failure—but none of that has changed since she left. It’s all the same. 

She just doesn’t have anyone to lift her up any longer. 

Lonely. Claire’s so fucking lonely, and she’d been lonely while she was there, she thinks, because she’s an idiot, and this is what she does: hold herself back, pull herself away from people. 

When she has a problem, she solves it by pulling away. And now she has nobody to keep her from doing that. 

Claire sits quiet for a very long time. And then she picks up her phone. 

  
  
  


Claire meets with Rapo on a Thursday morning, early enough that she knows she won’t see any of her former coworkers on the way in. 

“Claire,” he says, holding open his office door. He’s smiling. He’s prepared to offer her a lot, Claire thinks, and maybe the thought shouldn’t surprise her, but it does. “Come on in.”

  
  
  


She stops by a certain desk on her way out. Fishes around in the top drawer until she finds a pen and something to write on, and adds a heart to the end of the note, her hands shaking. 

_ Brad. Call me!  _

  
  
  


When he sees her across the kitchen for the first time (for the millionth time, for the first new time) he smiles so brightly that she almost can’t look at him. 

“Half-Sour!” he bellows, spreading his arms wide. 

The rest of them catch sight of her at his words and she’s swarmed at the mouth of the kitchen, all laughing and smiles, Christina’s arms slung around her waist, Andy kissing her cheek. She sinks into their embraces, she answers all their questions. 

She talks to them but she’s looking at him, and he’s looking back. 

  
  
  


“Oh, Claire.” He’s smiling down at her, he’s smiling down at her, slotted here at her side at the station that’s become hers again. Leaning against the counter with wide palms and sturdy forearms, sleeves pushed up. “You fuckin’  _ nailed  _ it, Claire.”

Sometimes she thinks about what they all said at that bar years ago: something about the way she looks at Brad, the way she talks to him. She doesn’t bother to deny it anymore. Not to herself. 

“Oh my god, thank you,” she says. They’ve stopped filming, packed everything away, and now she and Brad are just hovering here, eating the remains of her gourmet Sno Balls, reluctant to pull apart. “It was so nice to come back and do one that went well.”

“Yeah, thanks to me,” Brad says, mouth full. He’s teasing her; she hits his arm but she softens the blow, fingers lingering a little. 

Brad’s eyes flicker down to where she’s touching him. Claire swallows, her throat suddenly dry, and presses her palm flat to his arm. Deliberate. 

“Claire,” he murmurs. He sounds strained. “Claire—”

“I have to say something,” she says. Too loud. Too sudden. She’s staring at the fold of his collar, at the place where fabric meets skin. Her heart is beating fast, and there’s nobody else down here with them. “I need to—please.”

A pause. The sound of his breath is slow, and shakes in the middle. “Ok, Claire,” he murmurs. “I’m all ears.”

She laughs a little, nervous, but relaxing. He’s Brad. He’s Brad, and he kissed her, and she loves him. 

She loves him. 

“I just,” she murmurs, and she stretches up onto her toes, and she kisses him. 

He makes a quiet sound, a sound like sighing. His arms go around her: one hand at the back of her neck, fingers tangled in her hair, and one covering the span of her waist. She leans into him at the same time that he pulls her closer, and he backs up against her station, spine curving to fit her more easily against him, framing her with the bracket of his long legs, bundling her up in his warmth. 

“Shit, Claire,” he gasps as they part, breathless just from that. She’s holding onto him so tightly. She’s holding onto him so tightly, because she’s let go too many times already and she’s not about to make that same mistake again. Brad leans in and nuzzles a soft kiss over her cheek, hands flexing on her waist unconsciously, and she closes her eyes and sways into him. “God, babe, I missed you.”

“I’m in love with you,” she says. It falls out, and she doesn’t stop it, even though her hands are still shaking and her heart is pounding at the inside of her chest. “I have been for a long time.”

She can feel his smile on her skin. “Well that’s pretty perfect, Claire,” he says.

She breathes out, and she tucks herself closer. “Oh yeah?”

A kiss to her forehead. “Yeah. ‘Cause I’m in love with you right back.”

  
  
  


She’s scrolling through the comments on the Sno Balls video one Sunday morning, tucked back against Brad’s chest in her sun-soaked bed. 

Claire smiles when she sees his. 

_ thats the stuff! Half Sour is back _

She’s back. Back to stay. 

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact! i know nothing about fixing washers, and also that youtube comment is a thing that actually exists. you're welcome.


End file.
